Look at this extremely cool game jam that's ongoing with plenty of time still left:

Narrative Alchemy Jam 2025
https://itch.io/jam/narrative-alchemy-jam-2025

*This is a jam for transformative narrative games of all kinds. It will be judged by me (Chance). Since I prefer to cultivate a collaborative rather than a competitive environment, and since judging is often highly subjective, I have chosen to use the word "Favorite" rather than "Best" for the award categories:

Favorite Educational Game - Open to educators and non-educators, as long as your game teaches something intended to be useful for players' personal growth or learning.

Favorite Therapeutic Game - Please enter only if you're a therapist, social worker, psychologist, counselor, life coach, neurodiversity researcher, etc. Games about therapy or therapeutic topics are allowed in other categories; this category is specifically for games intended for use as part of a therapy session.

Favorite Spiritual or Religious Game - You don't need to be clergy to submit to this category. Religious fundamentalists, including militant atheists, are not welcome.

Favorite Recreational Game - This is for games primarily intended to be fun to play, while also exploring a thought-provoking or emotionally resonant theme / genre.

Favorite Serious Game - This is for games intended to be thought-provoking, emotionally intense, or culturally important, but not necessarily fun or light-hearted.

Entering multiple categories is allowed, as long as it makes sense for your game. The only two categories that are mutually exclusive are "Favorite Recreational Game" and "Favorite Serious Game".

Since I'm a TTRPG and LARP designer with academic training in transformative role-playing game design, this jam is primarily geared toward analog, physical games. But if you're a CRPG or visual novel designer with an idea that fits, go for it! Some of my favorite transformative narrative games are computer games (e.g. The Longest Journey, The Talos Principle, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Disco Elysium).*

#GameJam #narrativeGames #TTRPG #CRPG #VisualNovel #transformativeGames

I've been thinking a lot about the role of game design in the broader cultural sense. It feels to me that so far the understanding of what game truly are has not really been understood by the vast majority of gamers. If we consider them from the perspective of propaganda (or message carriers if you will) it is clear to me that what they do is not necessarily the face value. A game about tanks that shoot other tanks is on the surface a very shallow/trite message. but if we instead look at the social interactions of a game and how it shapes our behavioral patterns and problem solving skills it becomes very apparent that even the simplest of games carry a lot of mind altering aspects.

Consider the creation of America's Army (AA) as a recruitment tool, and a well documented and effective one at that. The game has a clear interaction pattern which is the traditional get task, do task, get reward loop (in itself a pretty devious way of teaching hierarchic relationships to the players), but underneath/behind that there is another more devious purpose: normalization. AA normalizes the thought of becoming a recruit by telling the players that what they experience in the game is somehow comparable to what they would experience if they joined the army.

Consider how many games that work under a capitalist accumulation theory of economy. Even if it is disguised as a leveling system in a TTRPG or as a Achievement meta system.

Why do we see so few games that try to break out of the current paradigm of hierarchic and capitalistic hellscape? I am sure we have a lot of game designers that crave something else for us all. So why do we keep making models of the same type of structures that we want to get away from? I am sure we have better imaginations than that. Don't we?

A while back me and some friend made a zine creating a few design challenges for game designers who want to break the mold. Check it out.

https://jocher-symbolic-systems.itch.io/fxck-capitalist-game-design-zine

#gamedesign #capitalism #propaganda #theory #transformativegames #gamesforchange #fuckcapitalistgamedesign #imaginaryfutures #exploratory #creativity